Check Out Doom Running On A TI-83 Graphing Calculator

Getting the classic first-person shooter up and running on an 18 year-old calculator is surprisingly simple.

Old-school games are excellent in their own right, but that excellence gets bumped up a notch when gaming's greatest hits get up and running on systems they weren't designed for. The cool factor involved obviously rises tremendously when the game runs on hardware that wasn't really meant to play games at all, which makes playing Doom on a Texas Instruments TI-83 Plus sort of the crème de la crème of downgrade-style DIY gaming projects. And, as you can see from the above video, such a thing is not only possible, but remarkably simple.

This tutorial comes through YouTube channel Lazy Game Reviews, where host Clint goes through all the steps needed to get Doom (in this case zDoom) up and running on the familiar calculator. Aside from the hardware, everything needed to run the game as well as several other re-imagined classics is available either through the Texas Instruments website or TICalc.org, a popular repository of software available to install on various TI calculators.

Sure, it might not run as well as it might on virtually any other piece of hardware, but that's sort of the point — the TI-83, as well as the Plus model used in this example, sports a technically-underwhelming 6MHz processor backed up by 24 kB of RAM, so getting any program that might be considered fun up and running is a victory in itself. And, naturally, Doom running on a calculator makes for a delightfully-ideal sort of classroom distraction.